Gartner Hype Cycle 2012 – Emerging Technologies

Here is a summary of the Gartner Hype Cycle for “Emerging Technologies” for 2012 – what is stated explicitly, what can be inferred.

This Hype Cycle is suppose provide insight into emerging technologies that have broad, cross-industry relevance, and are transformational and high impact in potential.

Most crowded hype cycle on emerging technologies in last 10 years

48 technologies are listed in this year’s hype cycle which is the highest in last ten years. Last year they had 42 – year 2008 was the lowest (27) – year 2005 was the previous highest (44).

What does this imply?

May be Gartner is right when it says:

We are at an interesting moment — a time when the scenarios we’ve been talking about for a long time are almost becoming reality.

Which macro trends are stated explicitly in the report?

Any Channel, Any Device, Anywhere — Bring Your Own Everything

Smarter Things – things are smart and connected to the Internet

Big Data and Global-Scale Computing at Small Prices

The Human Way to Interact with Technology – speech, gesture etc.

What Payment Could Really Become – NFC, Mobile OTA etc.

The Voice of the Customer Is on File – making sense of behavior data already available

3D Print It at Home

But if you look closely at the 48 technologies listed in the hype-cycle you will notice that…

It is all about Consumerization and Hyper-connectivity

As you may know, Consumerization of IT describes the trend where technologies are adopted by consumer ahead of enterprise & government.

And

Hyper-connectivity is about connecting everything us-to-internet; things-to-internet; peer-to-peer; consumer-to-enterprise; enterprise-to-enterprise… and so on.

Out of the 48 technologies in the hype-cycle…

…14 are technologies for reaching out or interacting with consumers

Application Stores

Augmented Reality

BYOD

Consumer Telematics

Consumerization

Gamification

Home Health Monitoring

HTML5

Internet TV

Media Tablets

Mobile OTA Payment

NFC

NFC Payment

Virtual Worlds

What is “Consumerization” doing in the list of technologies? It is not a technology – it is a trend.

…8 are about analyzing, understanding and taking advantage of consumer behavior

Activity Streams

Big Data

Complex-Event Processing

Crowdsourcing

In-Memory Analytics

Predictive Analytics

Social Analytics

Text Analytics

…3 are about connecting things

Internet of Things

Machine-to-Machine Communication Services

Mesh Networks: Sensor

Is AI and Robotics nearing the Tipping Point?

For years both AI and Robotics have promised a lot but the reality has been far removed from the promise. Are we finally reaching a stage where we will see all the Sci-Fi turn into reality?

…10 of the technologies listed fall into this category

Audio Mining/Speech Analytics

Automatic Content Recognition

Autonomous Vehicles

Biometric Authentication Methods

Gesture Control

Human Augmentation

Mobile Robots

Natural-Language Question Answering

Speech Recognition

Speech-to-Speech Translation

What about technologies for improving efficiency or for reducing cost?

Even if you consider “Cloud Computing” technologies capable of improving efficiency or reducing cost, you have only…

…6 technologies listed under this category!

Cloud Computing

Hosted Virtual Desktops

Hybrid Cloud Computing

Idea Management

In-Memory Database Management Systems

Private Cloud Computing

Clear indication that we have reached a level of saturation on how much improvement we can achieve by just looking inwards.

Why has “Idea Management” appeared in the hype cycle for last 6 years and “Agile Methodologies” have never found a place?

After all both are process / methodology and you will agree that Agile has much larger impact and adoption than Idea Management.

What about the rest?

This leaves us with only…

…7 miscellaneous technologies – most of them very futuristic in nature

3D Bio-printing

3D Printing

3D Scanners

Quantum Computing

Silicon Anode Batteries

Volumetric and Holographic Displays

Wireless Power

What about the Priority Matrix?

Only technology listed under “Transformational impact in next 2 years” is Media Tablet, which is the term Gartner uses for iPad and other similar tablets.

Big Data, Cloud Computing, Gesture Control and In-Memory DBMS are listed under “Transformational impact in 2 to 5 years”. “Cloud Computing” is appearing under this category for last 5 years (from 2008). So, it is high time somebody asks the question…

Is the impact of cloud computing ever going to be transformational?

Finally…

How consistent is this year’s hype-cycle compared to previous years?

Year

% of technologies mentioned in the previous year’s hype-cycle

% of technologies mentioned in any in any hype-cycle since 2003

2012

63%

67%

2011

57%

60%

2010

50%

58%

2009

62%

71%

2008

44%

56%

2007

52%

59%

2006

47%

53%

2005

43%

48%

2004

46%

46%

As you can see from this table – it is much more consistent compared to previous years!

Udayan Banerjee is CTO at NIIT Technologies Ltd, an IT industry veteran with more than 30 years' experience. He blogs at http://setandbma.wordpress.com.
The blog focuses on emerging technologies like cloud computing, mobile computing, social media aka web 2.0 etc. It also contains stuff about agile methodology and trends in architecture. It is a world view seen through the lens of a software service provider based out of Bangalore and serving clients across the world.
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